How to Build a Strong Brand

When we set out to build the future of dental insurance, we knew that having a brand that truly differentiates us in the market would be key to our success. Here is a look at how our brand is evolving as our business grows, along with some of the steps we took to make that happen—steps that you can take, too.

Make your name work for you

When we started in 2012, the trend for tech companies was to purposely misspell the name of the company—by changing an ‘I’ to a ‘Y’ for example—to indicate that the company was innovative, edgy and fun. We took a different approach. Although we’re an innovative tech company too, we operate in the healthcare space and need to be a little more sophisticated. We chose the name “Beam” to bridge the gap between technology and healthcare: We “beam” data from your toothbrush and we also help you achieve a “beaming” smile. Having a one-syllable, easy-to-spell name has been a great way to sum up what we stand for, while still being distinctive.

Meet a need—even if it’s difficult

As we got a better sense of our customers and refined the positioning of our products and services, we found that it wasn’t digitization that was missing in the dental industry —it was customer experience. So, we honed our strategic initiatives to focus everything we do on delivering a truly delightful customer experience. 

That was easy to say, but difficult to do. In the B2C space, there are multiple companies, from Warby Parker to Dollar Shave Club, that have built deep brand affinity around how they treat their customers. But we were breaking new ground in the B2B2C dental insurance space and we certainly faced bigger barriers to entry and credibility than a retail brand might. If I had walked into a room and said, “We’re going to build a really cool pair of shoes and delight our customers around the shoe-buying experience,” most people would have gotten it right away. But when we said, “We’re going into a regulated industry and blending innovative technology with traditional insurance to deliver high-quality dental care that delights customers,” we encountered skeptics. 

Our brand grew by delighting the customer on the front end—through our toothbrushes, app and customer service—while simultaneously handling all the back-end technical and tactical stuff, like processing claims and following regulations. Meeting the need on both fronts earned us the credibility we needed in order to grow. 

Consider your audiences 

From a branding perspective, we’ve focused on what delights the member, but we never lose sight of our other audiences. In fact, we have five audiences to consider:

1.     Members (the folks that use our products)
2.     Brokers (the folks that distribute our products)
3.     HR managers (the folks that buy our products) 
4.     Dentists (the folks that deliver dental care)
5.     Our employees (the folks that build, sell and support our products)

Our external marketing campaigns may speak to members by extolling the virtues of our toothbrushes or our easy enrollment process. But behind the scenes, our technology team might be adding a line of code that’s going to deliver big benefits to HR managers or the brokers—and we’re communicating this message to them too. It’s all closely coupled in the customer journey. To do it well, you have to walk and chew gum at the same time. 

From an organizational perspective, we have a brand experience team (BrandX) that controls our external messages and marketing. This team includes our creative director and the designers who develop the visual language we use to convey the brand. Internally, I play a big role in setting the mission, vision, values and strategy of the company and rolling out messages to our employees. With this structure, we’re able to communicate to all our audiences and straddle the B2B and B2C worlds we operate in.

Listen and you shall hear 

We’ve been good listeners since the beginning. 

In the early days, I called and emailed members individually to see what they thought about our products. Now, we use more sophisticated means to solicit feedback from our members, assemble our Net Promoter Scores and inform other metrics for customer delight and satisfaction. 

For example, whenever we onboard a new member, our customer success team follows up to get feedback on the enrollment and setup process. We also do focus groups with different teams of brokers and HR managers every six months to get their ideas for features, feedback on friction points and insight into ways we can improve our service and experience. These have been really effective ways for us to get good ideas cycled through the system. 

The key with this process is to avoid getting distracted by anecdotes. For example, when we first started soliciting feedback, we worked with a small number of brokers. If two of them suggested we build a feature, we might run off and do it. Having a knee-jerk response to their feedback took our eye off the ball and led to some tail chasing. Today, we’ve developed rigor and scale with our feedback process and have been able to reach critical mass. 

Be different

If everyone in your industry talks about your product or service in the same way, do it differently. When we started the company, we looked at the dental industry across insurers like MetLife, oral care companies like Oral-B and dental practices themselves. All of their brands and messages were focused on the clinical nature of dentistry. We intentionally took a different approach to set our company apart from its competitors. If you look at our Instagram feed, you won’t see dentists in white coats or tutorials on how to floss. But you will see members posting photos of their Beam toothpaste tubes in locations around the globe—from Saint Martin to Vietnam. 

If you don’t have a better way to differentiate your brand right away, don’t force it. When we first started, we would share feedback from happy customers and talk about our company milestones, but we didn’t try to beat anyone over the head with our brand. As we got more customers, we gained more insight and we refined our approach. The key is to always be listening and learning. Which leads me to my final point…

Be authentic

We recently conducted our largest broker survey to date. And the biggest piece of feedback we got was this: We love when you show us what’s happening in your business. They really like seeing the stuff we share on social media about “Dog Day in the Office,” our Thanksgiving party, or hiring our 200th employee. And it’s because all the other dental insurance companies they work with—like MetLife, Guardian and Delta—are these faceless organizations with thousands of employees. With Beam, our brokers like being a fly on the wall of our company. It makes them feel like they’re part of our success. 

We’re continuing to explore the connection between authenticity and our brand. I’m working on a series of podcasts and videos that focus on the challenges small businesses face: hiring, onboarding, compensation, performance reviews. We’re pivoting away from messages like “buy dental insurance from us” and toward messages like “let’s build our small businesses and grow together.” I think this approach is really going to resonate with the HR managers and brokers who distribute and buy our services—stay tuned!

This article first appeared on the Georgian Growth Network.

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